About visual novels and Lovecraft

I have played Dagon recently.
You can think about it as a visual novel adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft’s short story.

It’s a bit more interesting than that actually.

Most visual novels tend to focus on the story and spam you with hordes of text, while the “visual” part of the game is changing only every few minutes of gameplay.
Usually just character slowly losing layers of clothes.

Okay, maybe not all visual novels, but those that came over my table are certainly…

Never mind, back to Lovecraft before FBI kicks down my door.

What makes Dagon different is how much it focuses on visuals.
There is actually very little narrative going on and you are rather left to watch, what’s going on around you in a fully rendered 3D environment.

This difference in focus is what makes Dagon interesting.
Developers seem to mostly understand this and included interesting mechanics, that force you to look around and progress only after you find a clue in the environment.

I would personally try to stress that aspect a lot more. There could be animations and movie sequences.
They did use it somewhat, but left player purely as an observer, rather than taking advantage of the fact that player is actually in the environment.
Example of such gameplay experiment would be:

• Pressing Left – Right inputs when climbing or running away
  
• Forcing player to look at the correct item and play different sequence if he chose wrongly
  
• Simple puzzles etc… etc…

These are of course from the top of my head and I am sure they have design challenges that would show up if they were implemented.

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There was only one design choice I found very frustrating.

Having to press a button after every single dialog to play the next dialog was completely taking me out of the flow.
I understand that’s what traditional visual novels do, but here it simply didn’t make sense.

For traditional visual novel, core loop is to read text and then continue to read more text.

Gameplay loop here is listening to the voice-over while you are looking around and enjoying the lovely tentacles filled view. (tentacles in a bad way)

Having to click on a button to play next dialog, actually takes me away from being immersed in the environment and the story.
It mostly works for traditional visual novels, where it lets you control the pacing, but the effect doesn’t transfer here.

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Overall, thumbs up from me.

I liked it.

It’s bit rough around the edges, but it’s interesting and that’s what I care about.
Dagon is taking a visual novel genre, grabs some from it and puts it in a very new clothes with some not quite implemented implications.

I am happy developers made this experiment and I am looking forward to their next game.

You can play Dagon here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1481400/Dagon_by_H_P_Lovecraft/

Bit Golem’s upcoming game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2361560/Dr_Emmersons_Nocturnes/?curator_clanid=40401317